The Old Old Things
Dear David:
I am skeptical of historical analogies, even though Weimar Germany and
post-Communist Russia never completed their "bourgeois revolutions" that led to
stability (look how well Germany is doing today). Nor is there an organized
"Russian Fascism" to step in and seize power. I do not think we can do anything
in Chechnya, ghastly as is the Russian behavior. Whatever noises we make cannot
be backed up by effective actions, so that any rhetoric in the end may make us
look even more foolish. But this is not the place to deal with such complex
issues. Since I believe that "normal" Western politics is the politics of
platitudes (and looking at Russia, perhaps we should not knock that), I am
going to pick up my theme of our democratic, domestic rhetoric and come back to
your turf, that of history, in a reverse manner. So ...
Yesterday I mentioned Tony Giddens as the house intellectual for Tony Blair.
In thinking back, every Democratic administration has had a resident in-house
intellectual. John F. Kennedy had Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.; Lyndon Johnson had
John P. Roche, a former president of the ADA; Jimmy Carter had Pat Caddell, the
Harvard pollster; and Bill Clinton has Sidney Blumenthal, who is sui
generis . The Republicans do not seem to have had any such intellectuals,
perhaps because they distrust them. (But, then, who wrote Ronald Reagan's flash
cards?)
The function of the in-house intellectual is to think up Big Ideas that are
to be imprinted into the historical period of the time (New Frontier, Great
Society) or to stroke visiting journalists or to combat other intellectuals.
Arthur Schlesinger propagated the idea that JFK would have taken us out of
Vietnam if he had lived. John Roche tried to pin Vietnam on JFK. Pat Caddell
fashioned Carter's "malaise" speech, blaming the people for the funk we were in
(recalling the Brecht remark: the people are against the government; the
government has to change the people), and now Sidney Blumenthal.
The other week, Godfrey Hodgson, a British journalist, wrote an essay in
The Guardian Weekly about an encounter in the White House:
President Clinton's communications director Sidney Blumenthal was rhapsodic
over dinner. People in Europe do not understand, he complained, that the U.S.
was creating a world society. The new politics, the new economics, the new
technology and the new immigration were coming together to change the tired old
rules of the game. There was more in the same poetic vein.
Two days ago was the 200 th anniversary of the death of George
Washington. On the Jim Lehrer NewsHour , Richard Brookhiser, who has
written a book called Founding Father , said that what George Washington
had done was to create "a new nation and a new people." And in 1963, 36 years
ago, Martin Lipset wrote a book about our founding called The First New
Nation . So new is obviously a tattered, tired old term. (Nu,
nu.)
Two hundred years. Is that a long time, historically speaking? In 1940 I
became a staff writer on the New Leader , then a large-format newspaper
weekly. The editor of the paper was a quiet, courtly old man named William E.
Bohn. He wrote the editorials; Victor Riesel and I wrote most of the paper. We
used pseudonyms to fill up the pages. I used John Donne, until Hemingway's book
came out, and then shifted to Andrew Marvell.
After we had put the paper "to bed" on Thursday mornings, we would sit and
talk about history. Bill Bohn had been expelled as a teacher from the
University of Pennsylvania in 1913 because he was a socialist. He startled us
once by saying that his older brother had fought in the American Civil War, and
that his grandfather had fought against Napoleon in 1815! So that was three
degrees of separation. Your young son Joseph will probably go to 2080 so for
almost 300 years, that will be six degrees of separation.
But history was always a living presence. I think of my late lamented friend
Boris Shub, son of the Menshevik historian David Shub, who had set up RIAS (the
radio station in the American sector) in Berlin in 1945, a major cold war
propaganda asset. When Boris was at De Witt Clinton High School in New York, in
the '30s, his history teacher once remarked that in February 1917, Alexander
Kerensky had made the Russian Revolution and was soon after overthrown by
Lenin. Boris shot up his hand and said: Kerensky did not make the February
revolution. That had been made by the Cadets (Constitutional Democrats) under
Prince Lvov. Lenin did not come to Russia until April, in the sealed train
across Germany. Kerensky had refused to take a job in the first cabinet, but
did in the second one when Muliukov became prime minister and Kerensky became
minister of war. In the third reshuffle, Kerensky became prime minister. How do
you know all this, asked the startled teacher. Because Kerensky told me, Boris
replied. (Kerensky lived until 1970, and one could see him, as I did, walking
across the Stanford campus, where he was affiliated with the Hoover
Institution. History lives.)
What impresses me, in fact, is that with all the blather about "the new,"
there is a hunger for history, and for many people, the old is more relevant
than the new. I was struck by this a decade or so ago when I was in Prague,
then still under Communist rule, where I had been invited to give a few
lectures to some Party institutes about technology. (At least the theory of
it.) After the sessions, my hosts eagerly escorted me around the city and took
me to the towering Hradcany Castle (Kafka's Castle, since he had once lived in
a small hovel in the wall underneath.) What they wanted to talk about was not
the future but the past, about the days of Rudolf II, who had ruled the Holy
Roman Empire in the 16 th century, when Prague dominated Europe,
before Vienna. And to show me the famous window of the Defenestration of
Prague, the glorious day in May 1618 during the Thirty Years War when two royal
Catholic officers had been hurled from the window by the Protestant members of
the Bohemian Diet--and being in Prague, had landed on a haystack below.
And I think, earlier this year, of Serbia, where the bones of Prince Lazar,
the martyr of the battle against the Turks in 1389, have become hallowed in
history and whose legends were written down by church scribes and canonized in
cycles of folk poetry. In commemoration of the 600 th anniversary of
the great battle, in 1989 Lazar's bones were taken for a tour around Serbia and
Bosnia, from monastery to monastery. Today they lie in Ravinica, and on Sundays
the coffin is opened for the faithful, and his brown and withered hands peek
out from under the shroud. (Will Lenin's embalmed body be around for 600
years?) I know that these are alleged bones, and emotional sentiments are
whipped up by the prayers of the priests and the nuns. But people
believe , or want to believe. That is why icons have the power they
have.
But since this will be the last round before the end of the century, shall
we conclude with a discussion of the Millennium--but which one?
Love,
Dad
